... but I think that Web-based things should be
tailored to the
medium, and that means that information should be arranged in a web-like
structure, not artificially forced into a one-dimensional structure like
traditional writing. It would be good to have a way to save related
articles together, but what is related depends on the reader, again. A
reader interested in Chap would want [[Chap]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]],
and [[Chap's views on Things]] saved together, whereas a reader interested
in Stuff would want [[Stuff]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and [[Guy's
views on Stuff]] all saved together. I expect a technical solution could
be thought up to enable readers to group articles for saving together,
according to their personal preferences. :)
* We do not require the reader to click around
unnecessarily, which can
be confusing to many people
I'm not sure I follow this argument. Isn't that what people do on the Web
all the time?
The issue with many small interlinked articles is noise. You won't be able to
type in "Sauna" and find what you would reasonably expect there (an
etymology, a bit about finnish culture, health issues, literature links),
instead you will have to use a *Search engine*, type in "Sauna" there, and
get an immense number of articles that aren't related to the subject at all,
like the fact that Johan Paulik made a film "Sauna paradiso" and that the MV
Blue Marvin (a ship) also has a sauna. This is the problem which we have with
the WWW today already, and we should do everything to avoid that wikipedia
will be running into the same problem in some years and just shows up as the
same noisy mess the WWW is today. We already have that problem right now: Go
and try to enter "palestine" in the wikipedia search: There are more than 500
matches. The one article named "Palestine" is more or less a link list. What
tells me that? I don't get the information out of Wikipedia, I'll get it out
of Britannica. (Check out this link and you'll understand the difference:
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=115036)
In other words: I do not want to need a google on wikipedia, to filter out
noise, because it probably filters out that part of noise I am interested in.
The only way to deal with that are IMHO *large* articles, structured by good
editors. It is far easier to scroll down a large article with good structure
(headlines) until you reach the part you are interested, than to klick around
and hope to find that piece of information somewhere in some article which is
somehow linked by a chain of three other articles.
Uli